Mashing two gameplay types together to create something different is a standard method of designing something new, so why has the idea behind Rogue Islands taken so long to show up? Rogue Islands features the familiar cube-world look to procedurally generate the type of dramatic terrain that’s so much fun to explore, and it casts you as a gnome wizard with a nice library of spells to toast, freeze, or zap the enemy creatures swarming the land. The game promises to focus as much on movement as it does on offense, allowing the wizard to fully explore the open islands of each level and have as much fun playing with the verticality of forests and mountains as blasting enemies.

In addition to the procedurally generated island levels, Rogue Islands gets its “roguelike” designation from the permadeath of each run. Additionally, crafting and meditation open up new abilities, there are three schools of magic to specialize in, and destructible environments to set ablaze or blast to pieces. It’s an ambitious design with some nice tech backing up its world rendering, and it should create some very fun world to blast through either alone of with friends.

Rogue Islands is on Greenlight and looking for love. Feel free to give it a hug and a positive vote, because seriously look at that thing in action in the video below. There’s a moment around 1:00 where the player jumps down onto a tree rising from a forested valley while across the map a cave glows red with a bat flapping away in its entrance. That’s the kind of world that begs the kind of exploration that leaves a lot of toasted monsters in its wake.